I'm working on a sonnet that I'm not very happy with. I suppose it's possible that the lines will knit themselves into a poem, but at the moment the piece resembles a nicely articulated skeleton more than a dramatic force. I hate it when my poems are dead.

Lately I've been reading Shelley, Sidney, Wordsworth, Bolton, Melville, Plath, Richard Ford, and the dictionary. My dead sonnet begins with a phrase from Ford's The Sportswriter ("Dreamy as Tarzan"), but probably it started turning into a sonnet because I'd been reading so many of Bolton's, though the form is Shakespearean, which most of his are not. Literary influence is not always easy to nail down. Nor is the urge to write in form. Mostly I don't, but sometimes the sounds in my head demand it.

Which reminds me: what did you think of that Sidney poem I posted on Saturday? I love his opening conceit: "My sheep are thoughts." It's so much better than "My thoughts are sheep." At least a million times better. That's what I want: that kind of solid confidence in my imagination.